College football: Northern Illinois to BCS is hot topic

What a weekend for Northern Illinois: Win a conference championship, lose a coach and bust the BCS.

The Huskies are headed to the Orange Bowl, set to make their Bowl Championship Series debut against Florida State. Northern Illinois won the Mid-American Conference title on Friday, lost coach Dave Doeren to North Carolina State on Saturday, and then spent Sunday anxiously waiting to see if it cracked the top 16 in the final BCS standings.

By 0.0404 points, the Huskies did just that and will play in Miami on Jan. 1 as their reward.

The MAC champions (12-1) were 15th in the final BCS standings. Finishing in the top 16 and ahead of the champion of a qualifying conference -- they actually finished ahead of two, Big East winner Louisville and Big Ten titlist Wisconsin -- meant the Huskies were automatically BCS-bound, earning them this date with the Atlantic Coast Conference champion Seminoles (11-2).

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Northern Illinois is the first MAC school to reach the BCS. The Huskies were 21st in last week's BCS standings, meaning they not only needed to beat Kent State -- which entered championship week as another BCS hopeful -- in the MAC title game to have a shot, they also needed some help to reach the top 16. And enough help came, particularly with Nebraska losing badly in the Big Ten title game, along with UCLA and Texas both falling over the weekend.

So it's the Huskies and Seminoles, a matchup that surely very few people would have expected when the season began, especially ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit.

"To put them in the BCS is an absolute joke ... I can't believe we're even having this discussion," Herbstreit said on ESPN Sunday night.

Former Northern Illinois quarterback and Madison graduate Josh Haldi, who threw for 6,015 yards and 55 touchdowns from 2001 to 2004, fired back in defense of his alma mater.

"My biggest issue is it's not Northern Illinois' issue," said Haldi. "It's the BCS' issue, and (NIU) played by the same rules that every other school did. I think all of this gets magnified with Northern getting in. It's just a function of the system.

"It's sad, and I wish ESPN would have done it different because I don't want the school and the team to get drug through the mud for the season they had."